That’s some Jared Leto action, right there.
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Oh yeah I’m not nearly enough of a masochist to do everything in these games.
Someday I’ll go back and finish the cabaret club storyline in Zero. Forgive me, Yuki 
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if only this was the olden days of sb where everyone had a main account and then a second account that was a parody of another poster
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Make sure you get to the top before 120 stars. Took me like 20 minutes but felt great.
Done with Grandia 2. It’s not bad overall, but felt like a huge slog in the last hours. So many times I thought the final boss was right around the corner only to find there’s still another entire dungeon, or a boss rush or whatever.
They definitely dialed up the anime to 11 since the first game. Most of Ryudo’s dialogue was the kind of edgy stuff all the late 90s anime dubs had.
The HD version is kinda messed up on Switch, if you play in handheld mode a lot of the battles are in slow motion. I mostly played on the train so it was extra infuriating. Also the japanese voice acting was often out of sync with the timing of the auto dialogue boxes, resulting in dialogue getting cut off and characters seeming to talk with the wrong voice. Kinda spoiled a few key scenes.
The sound is really weird in this game. Obviously there’s the weird walking noises but pretty much all the SFX felt like they had a really limited library of 1 second looping sounds and just used the closest approximation. So you end up with zombies that make a crackling ice noise or caterpillars that sound like a flock of seagulls. Rivers sound like a running tap noise cutting off and cycling every second.
Also playing through Doom 2. I think I can see why people say it is inferior to the first game. The level design just has a lot of big rooms filled with like 15 of the same monster and a lot of frustrating to-ing and fro-ing trying to work out where to go. Setting it on Earth also makes it look more drab and a bit nonsensical. Still, Doom is Doom so it’s still fun times
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Got around to playing New Doom this morning and it’s pretty good. That’s all I’ve got to say!
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That game was wild as hell, thanks for streaming it
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I’m currently scaling the “Argent Energy Tower” and it sucking fricks.
Verticality is this game’s biggest weakness. I’m playing on Ultra-Violence and I’ve died more to platforming mistakes than to demons. It’s often unclear whether I’m supposed to attempt a jump, and I don’t trust Doomguy’s fickle magnet-hands to grab onto ledges. Stop trying to make Half-Life a thing! It’s not working! It didn’t work in Half-Life either! Point and click games shouldn’t have platforming segments where you die if you fail to platform!
On top of that (hehe), the gunplay lost its exhilaration after I realized around the one hour mark that every combat encounter is meant to resolve itself. Oh, little zombie mooks that exist to refill your health bar? Thanks. Coulda saved me the trouble of pressing F by just putting a health pack there instead. Oh, a required encounter in a locked-down area with a single giant enemy? Good thing I have this chainsaw to just erase that enemy! Thanks for refilling all of my ammo! I mean, I didn’t really need it, but thanks!
I really liked the foundry level, because it’s been the most Doom-like level by far, with lots of winding passages and corridors and keys. It just felt like a chore because the level objective was to complete four static combat encounters. The level would have been way more engaging to me if it was just a labyrinth filled with a bunch of enemies. Most of the game feels like a corridor anyway, so why not just make it a “get to the end” level? In the original Doom games, I always knew my objective was to find the exit to the maze, and all of the enemies were simply there to impede my progress. Sometimes there were necessary combat encounters, especially in Doom 2, or in the case of end-chapter bosses, but it was generally more exciting for me to run past enemies and avoid combat until they became absolutely overwhelming. That’s not really an option in New Doom; the game just kind of expects you to beat up everything.
Also, the health bar might as well not exist. Instances of damage range from 50 to 100, at least on Ultra-Violence. Game coulda had a “three hits” system, or whatever. What’s the point of having separate suit upgrades for health and armor? They’re both pickups, they’re both “health”, the green one happens to be less common. And despite my instinct to pick up all of the pretty green shinies I see, it never really seems to make a difference. The only time I die in combat is when I accidentally let a big swingin’ giant dude out of sight, and he creeps up and whacks me right behind the head in one go! Every other enemy just really sucks at hitting me, and they get staggered too easily. Yup, this game feels mechanically designed around enemies that should absorb way more hits than they currently do. I say this because adding more enemies wouldn’t increase the difficulty. AOE weapons are abundant and powerful, and once I weaken an entire group of enemies with an explosion, I can just go melee-happy and press F to pay multiple respects in a row.
Man, to hell with this game. keeps playing
EDIT: Oh cool, it crashed in the background while I was writing this.
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I loved nu-doom but i also loved scouring the corners for the bobbleheads and felt like the combat was hard enough to feel like a challenge but not actually be. i didn’t really see the seams in the game very much at all, but i was also not playing on ultra-violence. i am the target audience, probably
I take back my health bar comment because I’m in HELL now and HELL is pretty hard. The enemies are abundant and feel more aggressive. Also the space is really open and fun to jump around in.
EDIT: I actually take back a lot of my criticism because the entire facility felt like the tutorial and now hell feels like “haha here’s the REAL game, idiot.”
I’m getting my ass kicked. I hope it’s more than just a quick final chapter. I honestly have no idea how close to finishing the game I am.
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Kadingir Sanctum is a very Painkiller-esque level. A big ol circular arena with a bunch of jerks to basically follow you around the racetrack.
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Hell is a lot of the game IIRC.
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you’re like 40% of the way through iirc
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thank you, my faith in this game is restored
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got to no. 1 in fire promoter normal difficulty, so i returned to bloodborne.
killed rom the vacuous spider, now the moon’s red and there’s kaiju-sized monsters climbing on rooftops and trying to grab me while dead enemies revive D:
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This is funny because my experience of the game is that it just gets easier as you go on and you get bigger weapons and more upgrades. I think you’re probably at peak difficulty and you’ll see it go down from here
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The game would have felt better if they had just ended it after Kadingir Sanctum. Nothing after felt anywhere as good. Really felt like from then on it was all “Been here, done this.”
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Yeah I just got back from hell and it’s like… oh… I’m back.
Thought it was cool once you get back you go deeper and deeper into Mars.
So I am a good distance into Rise of the Tomb Raider and now have enough experience with both Tomb Raider IIs to feel comfortable comparing them.
There isn’t really a lot to compare.
*cough
Okay, the one thing that is interesting between the two is that they both feel like they decided that they wanted to be a lot more cinematic than “just” wandering around a giant tomb, and it really shows how far gaming has come in that regard over the past twenty-two years. Rise is clearly inspired by Uncharted (albeit not nearly as good at it) and while it is a bit thin at times, it is mostly unobjectionable in execution.
Tomb Raider II in the first few levels has all sorts of ideas for cool cinematic set pieces to end the levels, but very little clue how to execute them. The first stage ends with you running through a longish sequence of booby traps one after the other, which neither the controls nor the camera is really capable of handling in anything resembling a smooth manner until you die a few times and start to memorize it. The second level has you having to race a speed boat through a door before it closes, complete with a big cinematic camera angle for when you go up a ramp and jump through a window in it. The thing is it has little idea how to signal you to do this as it just randomly has a bell ringing twelve times after you hit a certain switch and this is supposed to let you know that it has a time limit (also it is too far without the boat). The third level ends with you having to blow up a building with a randomly there dynamite plunger in order to be able to climb the wreckage, but it doesn’t even spring for an explosion cinematic and just replaces the building with a wrecked version when you turn back towards it.
I’m not sure the big cinematic push really serves either well, but it is eye opening how easier it is to deal with when it is at least frictionless as opposed to something that is a constant struggle.
Oh yeah, having actual functional combat makes a much bigger difference, probably should have lead with that.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is otherwise unobjectionable AAA comfort food, good to play through one of these every so often but is fairly generic and unmemorable to this point.
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